bus stops

Lately I've spent a lot of time at bus stops. I don't know if it's something particular to LA, or if it's just something everyone everywhere does, but people love to walk into the middle of the street, sometimes into traffic, just to try and see the bus coming. Some people play it cool for a while, then break down and run into the street, for others, it's the first thing they do.

At my internship at Sony one of the exercises we did was animate a sneeze. The basic direction was that a character anticipates a sneeze, sneezes and changes emotions. I got taken onto a film and didn't get to do all the exercises, so I thought I'd try my hand at this one. I had done a take where it was a guy at a chess match, but I felt I needed to get a character up off the ground and move around a bit. Watching some Chaplin, I got some inspiration for this little bit. I'd love it if you could give me feed back, what's reading, what's not reading, what you're reading that you may think isn't right, etc.
I got sidetracked for a bit with a test where a guy had a cup full of coffee and was trying to get out a door. It was promising, but staging issues kept coming in the way and when the question of to go just realistic or cartoony and fun came up, neither had a good solution, so I took a moment to stop and change gears, for the better. Now I have a situation that I can not only relate to, but that I have a pretty solid understanding of what I want out of it and a nice clear open stage to play it out on.

This is just my first pass at blocking, so a lot can still change. I feel a lot of the poses can probably be strengthened yet and the timing could be tightened up (I stayed pretty close to my reference for now).



I was suggested to figure out what I want to do and go for it, be it cartoony animation or realistic. I feel that things aren't quite that black and white because my favorite style of animation is a nice blend of the two. Like how caricature is a bit of an inbetween between realistic rendering and cartoon drawings. There are things that are accentuated, but the whole of the idea is grounded and recognizable as coming from reality.